


let's not talk of love or chains and things we can't untie

by Panny



Category: Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F, Hair Braiding, Hair Brushing, Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort - Character Doesn't Expect Tenderness But Gets It Anyway, Implied Canon-Typical Violence, Other, The Intimacy of Brushing/Braiding/Washing Another Person's Hair, Touch-Starved, Touch-Starved Character gets their hair stroked & gets other kind gentle touches & cuddles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:20:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28489701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Panny/pseuds/Panny
Summary: Floralinda's hair becomes a liability, so Cobweb does the practical thing and helps her fix it. Floralinda might get a little more out of the experience than just practicality.
Relationships: Cobweb/Floralinda
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7
Collections: Bulletproof 20/21





	let's not talk of love or chains and things we can't untie

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WolffyLuna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WolffyLuna/gifts).



> End notes include relevant canon info/primer for anyone reading canon-blind (spoilers for the novella).

For the most part, the princes were not so interesting a challenge as either of them had hoped. They were generally well-trained, of course, which was more than one could say about any resident of the tower. And they were usually outfitted with arms and armour that probably cost a literal king’s ransom, which should have counted for something. It wasn’t that the witch had been stingy—not at all, she had her professional pride to consider! But she was still paying off the cost of the diamond dragon from the previous round and she had an entire tower of monstrosities to finance. Arming a single person was surely a more fiscally efficient endeavour.

Even so, none of them seemed to entirely know what to do when they entered the tower and found a rather grimy girl wielding a sharp stick on the first flight. Floralinda experienced no such quandary and would typically stab them until they stopped moving. This proved to be a remarkably effective strategy in dispatching princes numbered one through eleven.

The twelfth prince was just as susceptible to death by perforation as his predecessors had been, but he proved himself to be of a different stock. That stock may not have been better so much as more willing to trade dignity for survival (though arguably those are equivalent traits), but screaming and flailing paid dividends when his hands managed to claw their way into Floralinda’s long hair. While Floralinda could hardly be said to possess many princessly qualities any longer, she was still rather princess-shaped. It was a small matter for a prince, having seized her strawberry-stained curls, to yank and send her slight form crashing to the floor, her spear skittering across the hard stone. The prince, being possessed of the will to not be stabbed by Floralinda yet another time, then attempted to pin and strangle her before she could recover. He had made an impressive effort overall and it was therefore a terrible shame that he assumed that disarming Floralinda had rendered her helpless.

Even princess-shaped things had teeth, after all.

“Unacceptable,” said Cobweb, which could have been in reference to anything really. The list of things that Cobweb actually found to be acceptable was small to the point it was almost proportionate. She had taken to writing down lists of Floralinda’s faults in her tiny note pad and then reading them back to her at night as some sort of cleansing ritual. The act always seemed to cheer Cobweb greatly and Floralinda found it hard to mind overly much when Cobweb looked so darling all puffed up with indignation.

Floralinda was much too tired to dwell on the matter at any rate. It had been a long afternoon of dragging the prince’s body off the property under the full sun. Unlike the dragon, she had no interest in eating the princes she killed and she would not suffer them decomposing within the place in which she lived. Furthermore, she had found that it was not enough to merely leave them outside because upon seeing their bodies, other princes would become much discouraged and if no one entered the tower, then guarding it would become dreadfully boring.

Floralinda sliced daintily into her apple with good manners that proved that some things are ingrained more deeply than even our sense of self. Accepting apples from witches felt a little cliché in a way that Floralinda didn’t overly enjoy, but at least it wasn’t an orange this time (and she and Cobweb had been quite specific about the clause in her contract against oranges and the provision thereof). She was so focused on her task and contemplating whether she might convince Cobweb to negotiate for a performance bonus of a nice sharp cheese that she failed to notice the light tugging on her hair until Cobweb flew around in front of her, presenting a knotted section of what might generously be called curls with distaste.

“I really don’t see why you haven’t cut this off yet,” Cobweb said, letting the strands swing back into position with a distressing heaviness. “Some of those princes wore their hair quite short, which seemed very practical of them.”

“Princes are _boys_ ,” Floralinda said. Some long-buried part of her had awoken at the suggestion and was thoroughly aghast. Her hair! Shorn! The very idea!

Cobweb did not appear impressed. “Well, I don’t see why you’re so insistent on being a girl if it requires all—this.” Cobweb gestured to the whole of her, which was quite rude and rather difficult not to take personally.

“And anyway, I like my hair and I shan’t be cutting it.” Floralinda harrumphed with all the stubbornness of someone who had frequently had her way as a child.

“But surely you will have to do something with it.” Cobweb flitted about, eying Floralinda’s head critically. “It would not be possible even to tie it out of the way as it is now.” Floralinda had to acknowledge the truth in this, touching one hand to curls that had once been butter-coloured and soft in what felt like another lifetime.

“Oh, I do wish I had a bath,” Floralinda said with true longing, the depth of which surprised even herself. “But the nearest suitable pool of water is all the way on flight twenty-five and I am sure that some creature is occupying it now.”

Cobweb looked thoughtful for a moment, face creasing in the most lovely way, before darting toward where Floralinda had discarded the bare core of her apple. Her small fairy hands scrabbled at its regenerating flesh for a moment before freeing a seed, which she examined carefully. At last she asked: “How many apples can you eat?”

At some point they had had to change their approach because Floralinda could not eat that many apples as it turned out and the process was slow going besides. She had made something of a game of pulping the apple down the tower’s hard steps (which was both messy and more fun than she’d cared to admit) while Cobweb dug out and ground the seeds until she could mix them into something like a thin paste. She had produced such a quantity that Floralinda was forced to carry it as they ascended flights two through twenty-four, which at least Floralinda found more easily done than they had been to descend the first time. She was rather losing some of her sympathy for the princes if this was all they had to contend with, though she supposed it was still not so lucky to be sent off to die for a princess that none of them had ever managed to meet (and she, for the first time in a long time, spared a thought for the top of the tower and whoever might have been up there now).

Flight twenty-five was a bit trickier because they could not avoid the creature that lived there. The witch had not bothered investing in another siren, for which Floralinda was somewhat grateful for she was still sometimes strangely sad about the last one. Instead, the pool was home to an octopus of unusual size and though the tower’s magic meant that it would never starve, like all creatures who lived there, it was hungry.

It lashed out with its large tentacles any time Floralinda got too close to the edge of the pool. This was actually rather useful as it meant she could curl them around her spear like an overly large fork of spaghetti so that Cobweb had better access to stab them with a small knife coated in the apple seed paste. Still, they had stabbed it a number of times by now and the octopus did not seem any less intent on eating Floralinda. “It would be much simpler just to kill it,” she said because it needed saying.

“That would be a violation of your contract,” Cobweb said. “I’m not going to court just because you’re lazy.”

“But we are poisoning it. What if this kills it anyway?”

“Then it shall not have been my intent to do so and intent is nine tenths of the law.” Cobweb shrugged, unconcerned. “If we dose it with a small enough amount, it should be fine.”

Floralinda dutifully twirled her spear and Cobweb stabbed again. “How much do you think it needs before it starts to work?”

“I don’t know.” Cobweb seemed quite put out by this admission. “I had much more experience with the neurotoxin and I wish you hadn’t wasted it all getting down the tower if we were just going to go up again.”

Twirl. Stab. “Perhaps one day a prince might make it far enough to kill another spider and then you could have all the neurotoxin you want.”

“That seems unlikely,” said Cobweb, on the cusp of a full sulk. Floralinda preened because accidental praise was still praise.

After the octopus finally did the cephalopodian equivalent of passing out, Floralinda had approached her hard-won bath with some amount of trepidation, unable to shake the recollection of every cold scrubbing she’d endured over the endless days of winter. But seasons had passed as they were wont to do and the stone tower had been warming all day in the hot summer sun. There was enough transference of heat that the water was very nearly comfortable when Floralinda mustered the necessary courage to submerge herself.

She surfaced near the dais upon which Cobweb had perched herself, peering over the edge to watch Floralinda with an unreadable expression on her sweet face. “You shall have to keep still if you want my help with your hair.”

Floralinda swallowed her surprise (for while Cobweb had often been very helpful to her, that help had usually come after much wheedling and flattery and sometimes even tears) and did as she was bidden. She sat quietly in a shallow part of the pool where she could remain submerged enough for some gesture at modesty, hands folded neatly in her lap like the princess she had once been. Cobweb circled Floralinda’s head a couple of times before settling on her shoulder and cautiously plunging her hands into a mass of knotted hair. Cobweb was uncharacteristically tentative at first and Floralinda felt very little—a strange, subtle tugging against her scalp as Cobweb manually unwove each strand with more delicacy than any human would have been able (or cared) to use. It was one of the strangest things that Floralinda (who had experienced many strange things by now) had ever experienced and even the warmth of the water could not keep a shiver from working its way down her back.

Cobweb froze, hands stilling, and Floralinda nearly cried out with dismay. “Did that hurt?” Her voice was aiming for somewhere within the intersection of aloof and curious, but there was an unusually hesitant quality that flattened it out.

“No,” Floralinda said, the response coming indecently quick. And then, tempered by her own hesitance: “You could be a little firmer, if you like.”

“You say that as if I would have any preference regarding what happens with _your_ hair.” But when Cobweb’s hands returned, her grip _was_ a little firmer and her movements a little more sure, creating tiny points of tension along Floralinda’s scalp that were almost alarmingly soothing. Floralinda had not had anyone touch her with such care since the floor’s former occupant and the effect of that had rather been spoiled when the siren had tried to kill her (though she could hardly be blamed for that of course; one could not expect a monster to act against their nature nor the terms of their employment). Floralinda had not had anyone touch her in a long time who were not either princes or Cobweb and the princes mostly wanted to slay her and Cobweb, while Floralinda loved her dearly, was not especially _nice_. But Cobweb was not afraid of hard work and had such exceptionally clever hands and even if she did not like her, Floralinda knew that Cobweb loved her also for Cobweb had said nearly as much and had, after all, come back. And somehow this all led to Cobweb addressing each knot with a gentle patience that Floralinda had resigned herself to only feeling in the memories of a life now closed to her.

The detangling was a slow methodical process during which Floralinda shivered many more times and Cobweb did not stop again. Each tangle falling away under Cobweb’s deft fingers sent competing lines of relief and tension sparking along Floralinda’s nerves until her skin was nearly singing with it, helpless little goosepimples breaking out over her neck and shoulders, teeth worrying at her lip. When at last the final knot came loose and Cobweb smoothed her fingers through the curls that sprang free before fluttering off somewhere else, the sense of longing that hollowed out Floralinda’s stomach would have been enough to send her to her knees had she been standing.

There was a gentle _plink_ at her side and something floated delicately across the surface of the water—a comb that Floralinda had last seen sliding through the siren’s seaweed green hair. She reached for it with numb fingers, unable to think for a moment where it might have come from. “You have a frankly ridiculous amount of hair and it is very heavy,” Cobweb said, settling again on her shoulder, wings shuddering until moisture flicked from them. “If you want my help braiding it, you’ll have to separate the sections yourself.”

As if in a dream, Floralinda ran the comb through her hair, the familiar motion a comfort that loosened something within her chest that had been tight for too long—perhaps ever since Cobweb left her alone on flight two. Or maybe even earlier, when Cobweb had been swallowed whole by that horrible strix and Floralinda had known at once in her despair that she loved her and that she would never again be happy if she let her go. Cobweb kept to her word and as Floralinda laid three damp sections out along the width of her shoulders, the fairy wound them over each other until Floralinda was left with a loose but serviceable braid. When it was done, Cobweb flew off to the side and hummed critically. “I suppose this will have to do for now.”

“Thank you, Cobweb,” Floralinda said with appropriate grace. And then she promptly burst into tears. Her cries were big, ugly hiccupping things that were bereft of dignity and made her face hurt, but she kept her eyes screwed up and let them come anyway. She only braved a watery squint at the world after she felt tiny hands patting along her cheek. “I’m not a princess anymore,” she said and the words came remarkably easily and without any additional misery. “My tears aren’t good for anything.”

“I know,” said Cobweb, who looked mightily uncomfortable. She continued to pat along Floralinda’s cheek anyway, not so much wiping away her tears as spreading them around. Occasionally she made vague shushing noises and said things like “there, there”, which were all technically appropriate for the situation. Floralinda almost cried harder out of sheer wonder because Cobweb had never before done such a thing and tried very hard to stop, inhaling wetly through her nose, out of the fear that she would never be moved to do such a thing again.

Steadily her latter efforts won out and Floralinda recovered enough dignity to leave the pool (the octopus still had not woken up but she wasn’t sure how one went about checking if such a creature was alive or dead and decided to just hope for the best) and seek out her trousers. Cobweb watched her quietly all the while and Floralinda was still feeling the kind of raw and sore that one always was after a good cry and so didn’t protest. Cobweb was remarkably docile and allowed Floralinda to carry her down twenty-four flights cupped in her hands, even only mildly complaining when she pressed a gentle kiss to the top of her head as they reached the bottom step. “I do love you, you know,” Floralinda said in the tones of one speaking an absolute truth.

“Yes, well,” said Cobweb, “it’s about the same for me, I guess.”

Floralinda spent the evening gloating over her new braid, twirling in front of the old mirror the witch had let her bring down from flight forty so that it whipped about her. Even as she lay down to sleep, she continued to pet it with hunger, fingers trailing over the newly soft texture, washed flaxen in the moonlight. She considered how many princes it might take before she convinced Cobweb to help her fix it up again.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Floralinda** starts the story as a princess who has been put in the top of a forty-flight tower by a witch (because this is just a thing that witches do, though this one is at least in it for the art) with a different monster on every floor. After the princes stop coming (because many of them have died to the diamond scale dragon on the first floor), Floralinda is forced to make her way down the tower herself. Over time, she goes from frequently panicking and crying to reveling in the violence and thrill of battle against the monsters. By the time she reaches the end, Floralinda has lost the qualities that made her a princess and become a monster herself. The witch ends up offering her a job.
> 
>  **Cobweb** is a fairy who ends up stuck in Floralinda's tower after she hurts her wing. Cobweb doesn't understand humans very well and doesn't think much of Floralinda (who doesn't understand most other things very well). Fairies don't typically have a concept of gender, but Floralinda (who cares about gender very much) asks her to be a girl and Cobweb agrees (because she doesn't care) and remains a girl thereafter. Cobweb winds up helping Floralinda with her challenges, but she intends to leave as soon as her wing is healed. To prevent this, Floralinda puts a necklace weighted with rings around Cobweb's neck so she can't fly away. Floralinda promises to let Cobweb go should she ever come to love her and then immediately reneges on this promise because love makes the idea of letting her go unbearable. Floralinda finally does let Cobweb leave just before she faces the first floor, but Cobweb returns, taking the position of her agent in negotiating with the witch, and confessing that she's come to love Floralinda in turn.
> 
>  **Floralinda & Cobweb** (as depicted on the cover): [Link](https://ibb.co/55s2yYy)
> 
>  **Other Details**  
>  -The witch left Floralinda regenerating food so that she wouldn't starve, which included two loaves of bread and an orange.  
> -Floralinda's hair gets so gunky by the end that it's a completely different colour.  
> -Floralinda typically fights with a makeshift spear dipped in venom from a giant spider she kills, which Cobweb theorizes acts as a neurotoxin. It's very effective on most things.  
> -At one point, Floralinda almost loses to a siren because the siren touches her nicely and she's had no one who's done that in such a long time.  
> -Cobweb was once swallowed by a giant owl (the stryx) before Floralinda saved her. With violence.  
> -Princess tears have healing properties. Floralinda's tears being less effective is one of the first signs she's no longer a princess.


End file.
